Perhaps aware of the dean’s wandering interest, Roland asked if, regarding the current research in econometrics, he should pause to explain or to clarify.
“No, I’m with you,” Phil said. He hadn’t taken a social science class since eleventh grade, but it was his job to keep abreast of the major trends in a wide range of disciplines. Having recently attended a presentation in the Art Department that involved the painting of historical portraits on the testes of sheep, he felt capable of withstanding the quirks in any field.
Roland refilled their drinks. Hesitant to launch directly into the need for a larger share of the building (he’d had Marilyn Hoopes check the dimensions of the dean’s office, and learned that it was smaller and more modest than his own), he opted for a subtler approach. “Phil,” he said, “you can see I’ve been fortunate. I’ve done well here at Payne. I’ve built and run a preeminent department, and I’ve made important, beneficial community ties.”
Still waiting for Roland’s ask, the dean tipped back his wine. He put his fork, which held a vinaigrette-stained leaf of arugula, on Roland’s desk.
“I’m not going to minimize my own accomplishments or efforts”—Roland wanted to pick up the fork and wipe its tines on the dean’s tan pants—“but I’m able to recognize that Payne has given me a lot, and I’m in the position, now, to want to give back.”
This was an intriguing bit of rhetorical feathering. The dean waited; he reached for a truffle; he was not in a rush.
“For example,” Roland said. “I suspect you’re having trouble recruiting faculty for some of your committees.”
The truffle—dark chocolate with some sort of buttercream—was exquisite. The dean bobbed his head. A core ingredient of his job was finding faculty to serve on committees; and each semester, the number of campus committees grew, even the Committee on Committees spawning subgroups with elaborate charters and mandates, like a rapidly multiplying cancerous cell. Of course he was having trouble recruiting. Some of the faculty blocked his e-mails and didn’t answer when they saw the telltale number of his extension light up on their phones. Janet had looked askance at the list of assignments he had to fill and suggested that he staff at least a third of them with nonexistent professors bearing fictional names. “No one will notice,” she said. She had offered him a hundred dollars to experiment with this tactic, but he had declined.
“I do need two people for the appeals board,” he said, “as well as two for athletic oversight. If you have a colleague in mind who—”
“Actually,” Roland said, “I was thinking of the new quality assessment program.”
Phil Hinckler—known in certain circles as the human windsock—was temporarily speechless.
“I could be willing to serve,” Roland said. “Not as a member, but if you’re looking for someone to chair it.”
“You’re already chairing a department.” The dean reached for another truffle. “How do you know about QUAP?”
Roland moved his hands above the surface of his desk as if smoothing a bolt of invisible cloth. Of course he knew about QUAP. People knew. Rumors about the quality assessment program had been traded in whispers across the campus for over a year, with most faculty, heads firmly implanted in the sand, preferring to consider it an urban legend or a threat.
“Technically, the program doesn’t exist yet,” Phil said. “And the president wants us to move slowly, for all the obvious reasons.”
The obvious reasons, Roland concluded, were cowardice and prevarication. “I assume you’ve already asked Wyman to run it?”
Phil sighed and tossed the second truffle into his mouth.
“And I assume she refused?”
Yes, she’d refused. Wyman, the former chair of Geography, had asked for a 10 percent raise and a teaching reduction to convene the committee, and when these demands weren’t met she declined to serve on the basis of “general scruples.” Almost no one on campus would want to touch QUAP; a sort of wolf in sheep’s clothing, its mission would be to rank every academic unit according to a “quality metric.” But its methodology would clearly be punitive. Designed with Big Brother–like oversight capabilities, including the (rumored) capacity to revoke tenure, QUAP was the Death Star of university committees.
Roland thought the hush-hush hysteria about the program absurd. QUAP was simply a way of publicly and more emphatically enacting a process with which everyone on campus was already familiar: stronger, more functional departments would be rewarded; the weaker would not. He found himself repeating the acronym to himself, enjoying the feel of the word in his mouth. QUAP: the sound of a door clicking satisfactorily shut.
“I’ll need to…,” Phil said. “That is, I’ll have to speak to some of the other deans and the provost.”
“Absolutely. Of course.” Roland shoved the Pup-Dog statuette aside. The opinions of the other deans were irrelevant, and getting approval from the provost was a ruse: almost no one had ever seen Rutledge, who was said to be allergic to sunlight and for the past four years had been “working from home.”
He invited Phil Hinckler to take some truffles for the road, then looked at his watch: it had been forty-five minutes since the dean walked in. By prior arrangement, Marilyn Hoopes knocked at the door to remind him of a nonexistent appointment. “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but they’re waiting for you, Professor Gladwell.”
“Ah! Apologies.” Roland stood, extending a manicured, muscular hand.
Phil Hinckler hauled himself out of his chair, his knees creaking like hinges. He had thought QUAP would remain for another few years on the university’s almost limitless back burner, but with Roland volunteering to lead it…Inertia could slow things down for a semester or two, but after that…He shook Roland’s hand. The university was gradually being taken over by brawny, networking businessmen and -women who knew nothing of students, and who would turn the teaching of undergraduates into ill-paid, incidental labor. Four more years, Phil thought: that was as long as he could possibly last—his sons would have to borrow the money for college.
He took an indirect route out of the building, hoping to avoid faculty—especially in English, where Janet’s ex-husband, Fitger, was the chair. Phil stirred the truffles in his pocket, planning to share them with Janet that night after dinner; but he ended up eating them, one by one, in his office, alone.
THREE
In Fran’s opinion—not that anyone ever asked for her opinion—it was not a good idea for the incoming chair of a department to be absent during the very first week of the semester, to cancel his first class and his office hours and at least two meetings, and to tell his assistant to say he was sick (he didn’t sound sick) and could be reached via e-mail at home. Fran would have been happy to run the department herself—and could have done so with one hand tied behind her back—but as a member of the staff she was restricted to the status of eternal helpmeet, her fate inextricably allied with that of the chair. Sitting down at her desk with a cup of coffee (a scrim of aspartame floating along the top), she asked herself, not for the first time, whether, in being assigned to English, she had been a target of discrimination. She was four foot ten: someone had once told her that if she had been half an inch shorter, she would have qualified, legally, as a dwarf.
An hour into the morning she heard the squeak of the outer door and looked up in time to see Fitger’s briefcase turn the corner into his office. She needed to ask him about taking an extra hour at lunch: Gloria was under the weather—her tail feathers were soiled and oddly clumpy—and Fran had a 12:40 appointment at the vet. She positioned herself in Fitger’s doorway. “Ahem,” she said.
He looked up.
“Jesus Christ in a cradle.” Fran took a step back.
“Wasps,” Fitger said. He scratched himself. “It turns out I’m allergic.” He was wearing a wrinkled short-sleeved shirt and a bright red tie. “How bad does it look
?”
His face was dotted with welts the size of golf balls sliced in half. His right eye was swollen shut, and a bluish-red lump, like the beginning of a solitary horn, strained the skin between his overgrown brows.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“I can’t help it. Do you need some Benadryl?”
“I already took some. These goddamned lumps just refuse to go down.” His swollen left hand resembled an animal’s paw. “I have to teach at eleven, but I’ll probably work from home after that.”
“You can’t work from home. You’ve been out half a week. And you’re in charge of the welcome and orientation for new TAs and instructors—which I already rescheduled. It starts at one.”
Fitger pointed the plum-colored knurl on his head in her direction. Might Fran be able and/or willing to—
“No.” She was still staring. “I have an appointment off-campus.” She decided not to tell him about the vet. “Besides, leading the department is not my job. But I can give you the bullet points for the orientation. Ashkir typed them up.”
“Who is Ashkir?”
“Our undergrad office worker. From the work-study office. I hired him.”
But: Wasn’t the hiring of staff the chair’s responsibility?
“That depends,” Fran said.
“On what?”
“On whether you want to get anything done. You weren’t around; I had to hire him. You can meet him tomorrow. We can only afford him for ten hours a week.” She handed Fitger a piece of green paper that invited him to the first mind-bending kegger of the year.
“No. The other side,” she said. “We’re saving paper.”
Fitger flipped the page over and read:
ORIENTATION FOR NEW TAS AND GRADUATE INSTRUCTORS
You’re glad they’re here.
It is too late to make changes to their teaching assignments.
You are sorry about the basement office space—they should be careful of remaining scaffolding and please leave mouse- and ant-traps where they are.
Remind them not to sleep with the undergraduates, even when undergrads are older/hotter/more desirable than the norm.
No drugs or drinking with the undergrads, especially hard drugs while inside the building.
For all other policy matters and questions, see Fran.
“You can flesh it out and personalize it,” she said, “but those are the basics. By the way, you owe me $33.50.”
Fitger folded the paper into his pocket. Addressing the non-tenure-track instructors was a ticklish and morally complicated task—akin to a ship’s captain going belowdecks to rouse the galley slaves at their posts. “Why do I owe you $33.50?”
“I ordered bagels and cream cheese for the orientation. You can’t have an official gathering in the middle of the day without food. Not for this group.” She had met a few of the new instructors, who appeared to be in need of famine relief; they had the hollow, hopeless physique of refugees.
Fitger reached for his wallet, then stopped. Orientation was a department function. Couldn’t she take the bagels out of the budget?
“I think I mentioned this before,” Fran said. “We don’t have a budget. I hired Ashkir with our repair and maintenance funds.”
He shook his head. “So when do we get our department budget?”
“After you get the faculty to vote and approve of the Statement of Vision. Every other department submitted theirs last year.”
Statement of Vision: Fitger shuddered at the vacuity of the phrase. The SOV was a nebulous document intended to summarize the department’s purpose—as if the teaching of literature and composition were something obscure. “We can take care of that at the faculty meeting,” he said. “We have a draft, so it should be simple enough. Shouldn’t it?”
“I’m not going to answer that,” Fran said, “except to say that Dennis Cassovan has been looking for you. He stopped by several times in the past few days.”
Fitger scratched at himself, fingers raking his chest. Amazing that Cassovan was still teaching. How old was he—ninety?
“But hey, it isn’t all bad news,” Fran said. “Look. You got a new computer.”
Stacked in the corner of Fitger’s office, which was hot and airless because the window was closed, were three large cardboard boxes, their “this side up” arrows all pointing down.
“They couldn’t assemble it?” he asked.
Well, no: because when they delivered it, Fitger was gone and they needed his signature. But they would come back as soon as he requested another appointment—which, by the way, he should do very soon, because Tech-Help was busy at this time of year. “And that reminds me,” Fran said. “I scheduled the welcome and orientation in room 102B.”
Fitger gently kicked one of the cardboard boxes. Room 102B was a standard English Department classroom: chipped linoleum floor, teetering mismatched collection of uncomfortable desks, elementary school blackboard with half-inch remnants of chalk. “Why didn’t you schedule it in the conference room?”
“The conference room’s not available.”
“Why not?”
Fran sighed. It was only 9:45 a.m. and already she was thinking about being at home in her gravity-free chair with a bag of ice on her legs. “You really want to go into this now?”
“Go into what?” Fitger was scratching himself again; in her mind’s eye, Fran took up one of the extension cords and fastened his twitching hands behind his back.
“There’s a whole new system for room allocation,” she said. “The conference room designation was changed. It’s no longer designated for ‘primary use’ by our department.”
“But it’s our conference room,” Fitger said. “We’ve been using that room for thirty years.”
“That’s not how it works anymore. Under the new system, departments have to bid—and yes, I’m talking about money—for the use of any ‘common space.’ And someone bid for the conference room. So we can’t use it, because the room is reserved.”
Fitger couldn’t help pointing in the direction of the room. “But it’s just down the hall,” he said. “I’m talking about the conference room on our floor. You’re telling me we have to pay to use it?”
Yes, that’s what she was telling him, and she was well aware of the room’s location. “But if we haven’t reserved it, we can’t get into it. It’s locked. You need one of the new magnetic cards.”
A horsefly zoomed through the airspace between them; Fitger, still gun-shy given the incident with the wasps, recoiled. His swollen eye seemed to be leaking some kind of fluid. “What about our faculty meetings?” he asked. “Have you reserved the room beginning next week?”
“Did I mention that we don’t have a budget?” Fran asked. “I can’t bid on the conference room until we have a budget. And along with most of the other reasonable rooms, it’s probably taken by now—at least during the day. You might want to start scheduling faculty meetings for midnight on Wednesdays.” She watched him absorb this information. “Anyway, for now, you’re meeting in 102B, and you owe me thirty-five bucks.”
“I thought it was thirty-three and a half.”
Fran said she assumed that he didn’t have change.
* * *
—
An hour later, after right-siding and opening the computer boxes and staring, mystified, at the cables and plastic-wrapped machinery within, Fitger picked up his briefcase and trekked across campus to teach his first class. He normally taught in one of the generic 1970s-era buildings east of Willard, just past the gleaming new architectural wonder constructed for the benefit of the business school; but for the current semester (perhaps because of the new room-extortion system and his department’s indigence) he had been assigned to a nearly decommissioned cinder block slab on a dead-end road, between the facilities plan
t and the women’s gym. Pavender Hall—Fitger had heard it mentioned but had never entered it before—was flanked by industrial trash barrels and resembled a colorless brick that had been pressed into the earth by a giant foot. The front entrance was locked and much of the building appeared to be unused, but Fitger eventually made his way to Pavender 001, a faintly illuminated bunkerlike enclosure on the lower floor. Perhaps last used in a low-budget horror film, this windowless chamber had an emergency showerhead in one corner and had presumably, at the time of the first atomic explosions, been a science lab. Fitger’s twenty-four Literature of Apocalypse students—all of them freshmen—sat in long rows, some flanking a trough-like metal sink, others hunkered around an eyewash station or a stone-topped table equipped with levers that, when turned, released remnant whiffs of a foul-smelling gas. Pendulum chain-link lamps dangled overhead, suggestive of nooses. Putting his briefcase by the lectern and taking stock of these surroundings, Fitger heard one of the freshmen say to another, “This is so cool.”
All right, then: forward. After apologizing for missing their opening session, Fitger glanced at the roster, which he had meant to study in advance in order to pronounce his students’ names correctly (too late for that), and confronted the two dozen young strangers armed with pristine notebooks and pencils, who for most of their short lives had been hectored about the importance of education. Having purchased a $39,000 ticket, they found themselves seated in a radioactive bunker, their instructor a one-eyed Cthulhu restlessly scratching himself and pacing back and forth on an isthmus of faded carpet at the front of the room.
Buying time while shuffling through a stack of paper, he asked them to introduce themselves and tell him something about their reasons for taking the class. Several students proclaimed an interest in “death and stuff”—there was nothing like kicking off one’s college career with a cheerful survey of the end of the world—while most of the others admitted that the course had fit into their schedules. Fitger chafed at his weeping eye with his swollen hand and promised, in return for the students’ full and regular engagement, fourteen weeks of scintillating lecture/discussion punctuated by six short essays the details of which would soon be revealed.
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